Janson looked down at Berman, stunned and motionless on the gray tiled kitchen, and then out of the window. Outside, there was no sign of disturbance whatever. The afternoon sun nuzzled well-tended rosebushes, their small pink and white blossoms radiantly emerging from the tight-clustered leaves. The sky was blue, dappled with sparse wisps of white.

It seemed impossible, but it had happened, and his brain raced to make sense of it, even as he heard the approaching footsteps of the butler, obviously roused by his exclamation. On arrival, the butler immediately pulled Berman’s supine body out of range of the window, sliding it along the floor. It was the correct response. He, too, scanned the view from the window, holding a P7 sentry pistol in a hand as he did so. An amateur might have fired a shot out of the window for show: the butler did not do so. He had seen what Janson had seen; an exchange of glances revealed his bafflement. Just a few seconds elapsed before the two retreated to the hallway, safely away from the window. From the floor, Berman made rasping, wet noises, as breath forced its way through his injured airway, and his fingers began to scrabble at his chest wound. “Motherfucker,” he said in a strangled voice. “Tvoyu mat’!”

The fingers of his intact right hand trembled with exertion, as the Russian probed his wound with remarkable single-mindedness. He was fishing for the bullet, and gasping for breath, he yanked a crumpled mass of brass and lead from his chest.

“Look,” Janson said to the butler. “I know this has to be a shock to you, but I’m going to need you to stay calm and collected, Mr … .”

“Thwaite. And I’ve had fifteen years in the SAS. This isn’t a perimeter breach, we both know that. We’re looking at something else.”

“SAS, huh?”

“Mr. Berman may be crazy, but he’s not a fool. A man like that’s got enemies. We’ve prepared for the usual exigencies. But that shot came out of the clear blue. I can’t explain it.”

How had it happened?

Janson’s mind emptied, and then filled with elliptic curves and right angles. The horrific scene of bloodshed he had just witnessed dissolved into a shifting geometrical schema.

He’d need every fact that was available to him. He connected the point of penetration of Berman’s upstretched arm to the upper-left-quadrant chest wound. An elevation of approximately thirty-five degrees from the horizontal. Yet there was nothing visible in the vicinity at that angle.

Ergo the bullet had not been fired from the immediate vicinity.